Nowadays technology is increasingly being used to monitor what people are saying and doing (for example, through cellphone tracking and security cameras). In many cases, the people being monitored are unaware that this is happening. Do you think the advantages of this development outweigh the disadvantages?

With the advance of technology in the past decade and the increasing acts of aggression worldwide, it was only a matter of time before technology will be used to monitor people. In the next paragraphs I will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of civilians monitoring. The main purpose and biggest advantage of monitoring civilians is getting intelligence of potential terrorism attacks and other acts of violence in advance in order to stop it in time and save lives. Had we had the same technology back in the 90s and it had been used to monitor people worldwide as it is today, we probably could've avoided 9/11 catastrophe altogether and save thousands of innocent people. However, the most obvious disadvantage of this approach is invasion to privacy. Average people that just want to live their lives in peace are constantly being watched and examined. One could say that if you have nothing to hide, why would you care about being monitored? Well, just because I haven't done anything wrong, it doesn't mean I want somebody to know every move I make and may or may not use it against me, which leads me to next disadvantage - misuse of private data. Finally, following the previous disadvantage I mentioned, there is the aspect of data usage. Not only most of us are not even aware we are being watched, but none of us knows who are the men behind the cameras and what are they doing with the information they gathered. For example, during covid 19 pandemic, Israel's government decided to enable cellphone tracking to make sure people who should be quarantined will stay in their homes and to notify civilians in case the were near someone who has covid. A great intention indeed, however, someone decided to use this data for his personal vendetta. A few months after approving cellphone surveillance, I read an article about a women who received at least 3 sms messages from the health care department stating she was around someone who tested positive to covid and should go into lock down for two weeks. Turns out she never was around a sick person and her ex boyfriend, who works in the health department office, used the data he had on her to send her this messages from the health department. To conclude, I think monitoring civilians holds tremendous advantages as long as the collected data is being used only for saving lives, but as long the people who decides what to do with this data are not being monitored themselves by any known human rights organization, this method needs to be promptly stopped.